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Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Hi guys! john (the hubby of Jen) here. Jen asked me to write Sweets this week since she is apparently "busy" doing "everything else." (What? I moderate comments!)

Now, the problem is that today we have thoroughly awesome geek wedding cakes, and I am not, in the strictest sense of the word, a geek. At least, not to the degree which I've married into. However, for your entertainment and enlightenment I will now valiantly attempt to decipher these cakes without the help of Jen OR the interwebs. (May the Shwartz be with me!)

...is something steampunky! (Is that a word?) The gears and general awesomeness give it away. I also guarantee that when Jen and I get married again (to each other, I mean), our wedding cake will be something like this.

Oh, good, another easy one:

Submitted by Jess; baker unknown. Anyone recognize it?

Batman and Wonder Woman! Great colors. And I think the bottom tier is... Metropolis? Maybe?

Right. The adorable mushroom toppers are from a Mario game, and the cake is decorated in binary. Booyah. Just don't go asking me to translate it. (And if you do, I'll guess it's something like "In geekiness, and in über geekiness, I thee wed.)

Thank you John, for explaining these in a way that I (a non-geek) can understand. My daughter is still asleep and, as gifted as she is, could not decipher them for me. She will absolutely want that "math and hearts" cake for her wedding. Or maybe her sweet sixteen.

I am married to a monster movie expert -- the transformer Godzilla is actually Mechagodzilla, who battled the real Godzilla is a knock-down drag-out destroy Tokyo brawl. At any rate, it's a brilliant cake!

Every time someone mentions the ATA gene (from Stargate: Atlantis, for those not in the know), I always picture a microscopic AT-AT running amuck and blasting the bejebus out of the pitiful human genes.... but maybe that's just me.

Well done, john, well done. You explained everything in a way that those of us who don't know Godzilla from Alf can understand. (I never heard of steampunk until I read it on CW.) Yes, I do know Pacman. And "Star Wars", but only episodes 4-6 due to a major crush on Harrison Ford. I fail at geek.

I must give kudos to the decorator who did the binary cake -- perfectly spaced and painstakenly perfect. Bravo!! (Probably translates to "Why did I agree to do this job?")

I see that a couple of people said this already, but I think it's hilarious that another war over a round metal shiplike objects may be starting on your blog, so I wanted to chime in to say that that is neither epcot nor spaceship earth, but the death star. Or were you kidding?

John, I do enjoy when you "guest host", but I think you lost a few "geek points" in your knowledge today. You've never seen Godzilla movies?? Jen, you need to take care of that. Also the Futurama deficit. (I don't consider it a favorite show, but it can be amusing). And John, it is definitely time for you start reading XKCD comics!

I'm not any kind of "geek" but I LOVE the PacMan/Ms.PacMan cake!!!I played it a lot in the early 80s when there seemed to be a machine almost everywhere. I got to be very good at it, and it was fun to surprise any teenager waiting to play, as I know they figured that I'd only be playing for a minute or so. Even my kids were impressed! I was especially good at Ms. PacMan and still play it whenever I (rarely) find a machine. (I won't say how old I am, but was in my thirties when I first started to play. I can still play a pretty good game!)

The binary one is my 0010 favourite. (I pity that poor decorator who had to painstakingly cover it with 1s and 0s! They did a fab job)

Never seen Futurama, but the collision is adorable. And I'm hopeless with most computer games (gave up due to pac man, in fact), but I did love lego as a kid. (ooo, a snood or tetris or tesserae or spider solitaire or angry birds cake would be cool... those are games even I can play!)

Star Wars: Yes it's the Death Star. I would guess that the layers represent each of the 3 movies. (the original three) The first layer would be the "first" movie since it has a completed Death Star. The second layer would be Hoth from Empire. The Third would be Endor from Return. (BTW: Chewie was originally supposed to be from Endor until he came up with the Ewoks)

XKCD: i loose geek points on this one, but I'll have to check it out

Zelda: Yes 8-bit Link and Zelda. I love the little Tri-Force above them

John, I don't get the math and hearts either. But...I do love the idea of a big strong Wookie falling in love with a little short Ewok. And the old-school Zelda is great! Years ago a friend's kids gave me thier old Super NES when they got the next thing (gamecube?). The first game I played on it was Legend of Zelda. I still feel regret that I played it all the way to the last level and never beat the final level. :-( Great post!

Love, Love, LOVE! the Godzilla cake. When my boys were little, they played with Godzilla and Mechagodzilla toys that look just like those, so I thought the figures by the cake were plastic. Imagine my glee to find out they are real! And the fact that Mecha-G is demolishing the cake is so inspired. Great job today!

EPCOT...Metropolis...and probably several more "faux pas" that are over my head! You are either a glutton for punishment or one who simply gets devious passive-aggressive pleasure from messing with people. You crack me up!

As a closest geek and husband of the owner of Pink Cake Box, I was blown away how popular the XKCD cake has become. Anne has done all sorts of crazy/unique cakes over the years and the response to the XKCD cake has BY FAR has exceeded all other cakes in her portfolio.

Parsing the binary on cake 3 requires knowing where the start bit is. Since there is no beginning or end to a ring, there is no start bit. Meanwhile, Mario gets an extra life, but he also gets smaller. Moving right along...

Since "The cake is a lie" is part of the cake, the statement must be a lie as well. Therefore, the cake is true and the statement is a paradox. Like the statement, "there is no absolute truth." To which I reply, "are you absolutely sure?"

John was 'speaking' in the post, but down at the bottom is the usual 'posted by Jen'. What does it all mean?!

I gotta give credit where it's due: the Futurama cake was made by the fine folks at the Blue Cake Company in Little Rock, Arkansas. They took our design and created a spectacular centerpiece for our big day!

these cakes are great, but the detail i love the most is the top of the mario/code cake. looks like the baker just took and knife or little spatula and made those impressions under the characters. what a simple, beautiful way to add a little decor to the top of a tier.

If there really is any meaning to the binary, it's certainly not 8-bits ASCII. The following Python script cycles through all 8 possible "starting points" for bytes and prints the ASCII equivalent of each. Nothing but gibberish comes out. It's no better in 7 bits, either.

My guess is it's random, and from the looks of it, probably a human random generator too. I wrote down 390 bits, so you'd expect at least a handful of strings of five ones, but there are none.

These cakes are amazing! What on earth are they doing on a "Cake Wrecks" website?

"And I think the bottom tier is... Metropolis? Maybe?"

Looks more like the Hall of Justice. I used to watch the Super Friends cartoon show as a kid.

"Look! It's Epcot!"

This makes me wonder if Epcot center will look like the Deathstar after it grays with age.

"No clue. I see math and hearts."

Others here have already given the link to the comic strip that inspired this. You could read one of these as "What is the root of love?", another as "What is the identity of love?" and so on. Regardless, it seems that the underlying joke here is "our normal way of finding answers [using mathematical operations] doesn't work for us when we try to examine love."

"Is it... Zelda? Made of Lego?"

No, it's different Nintendo game characters (Link, Zelda, and the Super Mario Brothers mushroom) intentionally made to look like the old, lower-resolution (8-bit) video games. This is how they originally looked compared to today's standards.

Wow! That xkcd cake is the best wedding cake E.V.E.R. - bar none. My DH is a mathematician, and I am not joking you, when he and I first got together, I found a whole sheet of equations he once created to try to figure out why his ex-girlfriend dumped him. I love that man!

A few weeks late to the party, but the bottom tier in the Batman/Wonder Woman cake is definitely the Hall of Justice, first seen on Super Friends but later back-ported into the Justice League comics that the show was loosely based on (and the rather more-faithful Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons on Cartoon Network).

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